Resonance Is Key To Good Storytelling

April 06, 2003|By STEVE COURTNEY; Courant Staff Writer

Tracy Kidder is one of the foremost practitioners of using literary techniques to create nonfiction that reads like a novel.

His meticulous explorations of work and life in America include ``The Soul of a New Machine,'' on the development of a personal computer told through a team of engineers near Boston, and ``House,'' which detailed the construction of an Amherst-area couple's home. ``Among Schoolchildren'' took Holyoke fifth-grade teacher Chris Zajac through a school year, and ``Hometown,'' a portrait of Northampton, was told mainly through the eyes of police officer Tom O'Connor.

But reporters don't have to pursue literary excellence, he says. ``There are many different kinds of writers. There are feature writers and good honest reporters. They're all valuable. There's no great imperative that really good reporters need to be anything but really good reporters.''

But if a reporter writes features or literary nonfiction, he says, ``the sentences can't be quite so formulaic. Not all stories have to be constructed in the same way. You have a lot more freedom, and with it comes a lot more obligations and difficulties.''

Consider the beginning of a New Yorker profile Kidder expanded into his latest book, ``Mountains Beyond Mountains,'' due out in September from Random House:

``On maps of Haiti, National Highway 3 looks like a major thoroughfare. And, indeed, it is the gwo wout la, the biggest road over the Central Plateau, a dirt track where trucks of various sizes, overfilled with passengers, sway in and out of giant potholes, raising clouds of dust, their engines whining in low gear. A more numerous traffic plods along on donkeys and on foot, including a procession of the sick. They are headed for the village of Cange and the medical complex called Zanmi Lasante, Creole for Partners in Health. In an all but treeless landscape, it stands out like a fortress on a hillside, a large collection of concrete buildings half covered by tropical greenery. Now and then on the road, a bed moves slowly toward it, a bearer on each corner, a patient on the mattress.''

``You have to try to bring depictions of human beings to the page,'' Kidder says.

The story continues: ``Zanmi Lasante is famous in the Central Plateau, in part for its medical director, Dr. Paul Farmer, known as Dokte Paul, or Polo, or, occasionally, Bian Paul. The women in Zanmi Lasante's kitchen call him ti blan mwen -- ``my little white guy.'' Peasant farmers like to remember how, during the violent years of the coup that deposed President Aristide, the unarmed Dokte Paul faced down a soldier who tried to enter the complex carrying a gun. One peasant told me, ``God gives everyone a gift, and his gift is healing.''

Kidder says this book differs from previous ones set in Massachusetts.

``It's a brand-new kind of thing for me in its wide geographical spread: in Haiti, Russia, Peru, Cuba, Geneva, Montreal, Siberia. Farmer has had quite a life, embedded in really bad news -- the horrifying epidemics of this moment in time, epidemics intimately related to poverty. This is a person without an enormous amount of money behind him and with conventional wisdom against him who has achieved great things.''

The book tells how Farmer changed the approach to a strain of drug-resistant tuberculosis that spread in the Third World (and in America briefly, but ``a billion dollars or so stanched it,'' Kidder says). When the strain was discovered in a shantytown in Peru, it was considered ``not cost-effective'' to treat it, he says. Drugs that might help were patented and expensive. Farmer's actions drove the price down 95 percent, Kidder says.

``It's a wonderful object lesson that one should be wary when people say `not cost-effective.' And another thing: He was the very first person...''

Then Kidder's training takes over: ``In this world, you can never say something was `first' for sure. I believe he was the very first person to treat impoverished patients with AIDS for free.''

In an interview with the Atlantic Monthly a few years ago, Kidder said he doesn't think of a theme and then find stories to fit it (as Robert Caro says he did when he wanted to write about power and found Robert Moses). Instead, Kidder looks for stories, and themes develop naturally.

``All good stories have some kind of resonance,'' he told the Atlantic. ``All good stories open up. All good stories are about particulars.''

For example, a description of the lumber for the home in ``House'' takes readers from the couple having it built to the quadrant of Maine woods where it was harvested to a meditation on the depletion and renewal of forests.

``In what I just wrote,'' says Kidder, ``I was writing not just about a person, Paul Farmer, but about a big thing in his life: an incontrovertible truth that disease and poverty are inextricably linked, and the world as it is presently constituted is grotesquely unfair. So, yes, stories do open up.''